KEY TRENDS   • Oxfam India's 2023 India Supplement report on poverty and inequality in India reveals that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Following the pandemic in 2019, the bottom 50 per cent of the population have continued to see their wealth chipped away. By 2020, their income share was estimated to have fallen to only 13 per cent of the national income and have less than 3...

Contrary to the rising economic distress on the ground since the last few years, the official press release related to the fourth Annual Report on the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) at first glance seems to give a rosy picture about the employment situation in India.  Defined as the percentage of persons unemployed among the persons in the labour force, the unemployment rate in usual status (principal activity status + subsidiary economic activity status)...

-Hindustan Times McKinsey report paints a dire climate picture for India which it can’t escape without coordinated global action A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), on the likely consequences of global warming for Asia, has some very dire projections for India—bear in mind, the report projects Asia to suffer the brunt of the climate change impact. MGI’s may not be the first such projection for India, but at a...

Most reports and studies by official agencies, international think tanks and private entities indicate the cataclysmic impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the economy and society. They anticipate that lockdowns imposed by various countries across the globe to reduce the exponential diffusion of COVID-19 (i.e. for flattening the curve by social distancing and quarantines) would adversely affect economic growth and disrupt supply chains in most sectors, on top of causing...

-The Hindu The claim made by a magazine and carried by sections of media is not backed by data. The claim that the Indian economy has overtaken the U.K. economy in terms of absolute size, as made by a contributor to Forbes magazine and carried by sections of the Indian media, is not backed by data, an analysis by The Hindu of GDP data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the...